Al Qaeda members watched

A number of Australians who trained with Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda terrorist network in Afghanistan are back living in Australia and their movements are being monitored by security agencies.

A senior government source told The Sunday Age that the Australians visited Afghanistan for training over the past six or seven years before returning home.

Training is believed to have ranged from basic use of guns and explosives to much more sophisticated terrorist techniques.

There was no evidence that any of them had so far been involved in acts of terror, the government source said.

The source would not reveal the numbers involved or their locations.");document.write("

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"They're still free because they haven't committed any offence," said the source.

Last month the director-general of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, Dennis Richardson, told a parliamentary committee hearing that some terrorist groups with a global reach had a small number of supporters in Australia and a small number of Australians had trained at al Qaeda terrorist camps in Afghanistan. "Not all the latter are in US military custody," he said.

The act of training overseas with a terrorist organisation is not an offence in Australia.

It is an offence under the Crimes (Foreign Incursions and Recruitment) Act to receive training in the use of arms or explosives, or to practise military exercises with the intention of overthrowing a foreign government or spreading fear in a foreign country through the use of force or violence. For such a prosecution to succeed it must be proved that the training was carried out for those purposes.

Mr Richardson told the committee that he believed it ought to be a crime for an Australian to undertake terrorist training.

He also said Australia had a responsibility "to seek to ensure that those very few people in Australia with links to terrorist networks such as al Qaeda do not conduct or assist in terrorist acts in other countries".

The Sunday Age has been told that between the mid-1990s and September 11 last year between 10,000 and 20,000 people trained with al Qaeda in Afghanistan.

About 1400 were in captivity in the US, Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Afghanistan.

Two Australians are being held by US authorities after being captured in or near Afghanistan.

Adelaide man David Hicks is being held at the US military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and an Australian-Egyptian citizen, Mamdouh Habib, is being held in US custody in Afghanistan.